Thursday, February 28, 2013

1970s Global Cooling Alarmism

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." – George Santayana

"The scientists and computers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were confidently predicting that the frigid weather would continue. The chilling pronouncement of NOAA's senior climatologist: 'The forecast is for no change.' "
- Time Magazine, 1977
During the 1970s the media promoted global cooling alarmism with dire threats of a new ice age. Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls.

* Notes: A few of the news stories are duplicates in different papers with slightly different titles, this is intentional to show that these types of stories were not isolated to a certain regional paper. This list is not comprehensive since not all media publications from the time period are available in digital form.

From the ABC Evening News on January 18, 1977; January 11, 1978 and February 8, 1978.

"There's a theory advanced by climatologists that the last two years of battering by winter means that an ice age is returning to the Earth with glaciers down to the Mason-Dixon line and freezing temperatures south of that."

- Rhodes Scholar and 'Murrow Boy' Howard K. Smith, 1978

Update 4:

The scientific community acknowledged the cooling alamism of the 1970s in the scientific literature.

"One could effectively argue that in the early 1970s the prevailing view was that the earth was moving toward a new ice age. Many articles appeared in the scien-tific literature as well as in the popular press speculating about the impact on agriculture of a 1-2 "C cooling." - Climatic Change, 1985

See? I'm not crazy. I remember the news stories vividly. I was a teenager eating up all of the horror stories back in the '70's. I loved the "In Search of..." series. The ice age scare really did happen, so stop telling me it didn't.

Thanks also for the montage bookending Stephen Schneider's glorious lifetime career in fear-mongering. He was one of the best! He was ten times the Mann today's are.

Nor were the 1970s the first example of such climate alarmism. Scary predictions of climate change (both warming and cooling) seem to be de rigueur every time there are a couple of back-to-back warm or cool years. Here are some more examples.

This article of yours is clearly "best in class." It's an instant classic, which will be frequently referenced from many other web sites, and will help to open the eyes of many people who are naive and new to the climate debate. Your article is the perfect rebuttal to climate alarmists who're in denial about the 1970s ice age scare, which was driven by climatologists' dire warnings about anthropogenic global cooling. In fact, I just linked to your article in a comment on a climate alarmism blog.

As for Wm Connolley, he's still very active on Wikipedia, and still blatantly enforcing his bias in climate-related articles, as in this tiny example a few days ago. Wikipedia czar Jimbo Wales loves Connolley. He's not currently an official "administrator," but he has administrator-like rights called "autopatrol," "review," and "rollback."

Lamb, H. H. Is the Earth’s Climate Changing? For the past 30 years the temperature of our planet has been steadily dropping.The UNESCO Courier: a window open on the world; Vol. XXVI (8/9), 17-20HUBERT H. LAMB of Great Britain is an international authority on the long term processes of climatic change. He is director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (U.K.) and for many years has been actively engaged in international research on climate, in particular polar meteorology and the study of climatic fluctuations.Among his many writings are "The Changing Climate" (1966) and, most recently, "Climate: Present, Past and Future", a major study of which Volume I, "Fundamentals and the Climate Now" appeared last year (Methuen, London; Barnes and Noble, New York).

"Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls. " sound vaguely familiar. ..I love how opposite problems require the same solution.

PT cloth icetcexceed daysmnThere was real cooling in the middle of the twentieth century starting in 1940. In doing research on the Arctic I discovered that Arctic warming had started at the beginning of the twentieth century. But then it was interrupted with cooling starteing in 1940 and lasting until 1970. NOAA Arctic Report Card for 2010 has a twentieth century temperature chart for latitudes 60 and above that shows this clearly. from their data the rate of cooling for these thirty years was 0.3 degrees per decade. It so happens that 1940 was also the same year that the early century warming stopped. It had started in 1910 and bt 1940 global temperature had increased by 0.5 degrees Celsius. The cooling that followed 1940 was responsible for the extremely cold winters in the eastern theater of World War II. German tanks under Moscow could not move because their engines froze. Next year the battle of Stalingrad was fought in exceptionally cold Russian winter. This goes in parallel to what NOAA reported for the Arctic region. There was recovery from cold after the war ended but even in 1947 a blizzard could shut down the entire city of New York. I don't have data on the recovery and it is feasible that even after 1970 when the warming of the early century returned the lingering cold could have impressed observers. Unfortunately the temperatures of thisa period have neen contentious and it is possible that the y have been manipulated by the Hansen gang. Some warmists have claimed that the cooling was caused by aerosols from war production which I will simply discount. But I will not doubt that there must have been some record of cooling they felt needed to explained away. If you cannot find any record of it it has been disappeared by the guardians of temperature. These guys are not beyond inventing a warming as I discovered. In the eighties and nineties mean global temperature was constant for 18 years but they invented a non-existent "late twentieth century warming" to cover it up. I exposed that scam in my book "What Warming?" and two years later that warming was withdrawn.

On a hemispherical scale, there is rather conclusive evidence that the mean annual temperature is cooling (Van Loon and Williams, 1976). Recent work by Kukla et al.(1977) indicates this trend has not abated. They conclude from analysis of several variables including surface air temperature, upper atmosphere temperature, sea surface temperature, and relative area of snow on land and relative abundance of pack ice, that from 1950-1975, the rate of cooling for most of the above climatic indices in the northern hemisphere was between 0.10 and 1.20C. per decade. However, the slope of the changes versus time curve for most of the indices from the middle and low latitudes of the northern hemisphere increased during the interval 1971-1975. In the higher latitudes, the slope decreased or reversed. Peterson and Lawson (1978) using isotopic paleotemperature data and Box-Jenkins modeling to obtain a forecasting equation, predict an expected mean annual temperature decrease for the northern hemisphere of about 1.30C. (With 95% confidence limits of -0.1 and -2.4) over the next 5000 years. The point is, there appear to be different lines of evidence suggesting a present cooling trend with at least one study suggesting it will continue.

WOW, and another WOW! You are contributing more to bringing the truth to ''bingo player'' than anybody else ever did!!! BRAVO!

Predicting weather / climate is THE oldest profession - prostitution was the second oldest. because: IF they ''predict'' normal as usual - taxpayer get stingy; ''predictors'' are not stupid - they are dishonest, but not stupid

I inserted your links to those news clips, on my old post - please see the rest of the post: https://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/genesis-of-the-warmist-cult-2/

My grade school teacher told our class that by the end of the 20th century there would be glaciers taller than the buildings in Chicago. Danged if she wasn't right. I still can't get into Chicago because of the gigantic glaciers which is weird because I live 60 miles north of Chi-town and there are no glaciers here.Weather can't be predicted several days, weeks or months in advance. What makes people believe it can be predicted years in advance? If you ask me, all debate was settled when Algore bought ocean front property AFTER espousing that the seas were going to rise 30 feet by 1999. So why, why, WHY would you buy ocean front property if that were true? Hmmm?

It would be great if these materials were used to create a prime time TV special to show the younger generations (and remind those who lived through it) how "settled" the climate science was in the 1970's.

A note for the reading impaired - this article does not discuss the strawman argument of "scientific consensus" but rather documents the irrefutable evidence showing a media promoted global cooling alarmism in the 1970s.

Labels

Contact Form

Name

Email
*

Message
*

Follow PopularTechnology.net

Printfriendly

"Popular Technology.net is an impartial, highly cited website referenced by over 300 independent sources throughout more than 25 countries in books and scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major and regional news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, political institutions, on radio and by the technology community." - The Impact of Popular Technology.net